REVISIONISM HITS THE A-BOMB / Five books reconsider the Hiroshima decision 50 years later / Hiroshima in America

HIROSHIMA IN AMERICA

In a book that surely will provoke debate, "Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial," Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell describe what they regard as America's long and painful history of psychological "denial" over the bombing of Hiroshima.

"Part of each of us wishes to believe that the decision to use the bomb was reasonable and justified," they write, "but another part remains uncomfortable with what we did."

Calling the bombing an open wound in the American psyche, Lifton, a psychiatrist who has written powerfully about

the German doctors who experimented on prisoners in Nazi death camps, and Mitchell, editor of Nuclear Times magazine, leave no doubt as to where they stand. In their view, the bombing was questionable as either a military or a moral effort, yet because of an official "narrative," promoted almost from the moment President Truman gave the fateful order, Americans have been unable to confront these harsh truths -- "to face squarely what America did, or excuse it, perhaps even wish it away."

This collective self-deceit, they argue, not only led to public delusions about nuclear weaponry but also had other lingering and destructive fallout: It set the stage for the hysteria of McCarthyism, which, the authors assert, was fanned by public fears over the leak of nuclear secrets to the Communists; it gave the government a free hand to conduct nuclear tests while ignoring radiation dangers, to say nothing of the cruel radiation experiments it performed on unwitting victims; and, perhaps worst, it encouraged a climate of official deception that ultimately led to the secret bombings of Cambodia, to Watergate and to Iran-Contra.

Lifton and Mitchell trace all these assaults on democratic decency back to the original governmental lying about Hiroshima, which they call "the mother of all cover-ups, creating tonalities, distortions, manipulative procedures and patterns of concealment that have been applied to all American life that followed."

Coming as they do from a scholar as distinguished as Lifton, these charges add up to a powerful indictment. But how much evidence can he and his co- author muster? For starters, they revive the familiar (and in many eyes dubious) argument that Japan was on the verge of surrender, probably without the need for a costly U.S. invasion. In any case, they add, destroying the essentially civilian cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (with more than 200,000 deaths) wasn't necessary to end a war that essentially had been won.

So why did a "decent" man like Truman unleash such devastation? Regarded as a bookish mama's boy when he was growing up in rural Missouri, Truman, the authors contend, had to prove he was made of sterner stuff, especially after he succeeded to the presidency upon the death of the powerful Franklin Roosevelt. Intent on intimidating the Soviets, unwilling to bypass a superweapon that had cost more than $2 billion and drawing on his battlefield instincts as an old World War I artillery captain, Truman, they write, "decided to use the bomb because, like so many others, he was drawn to its ultimate power -- and because he was afraid not to."

They dismiss Truman's subsequent insistence that he never lost a wink of sleep over the decision as bravado "suppressing conscious feelings of self-condemnation." Such psychoanalytical interpretations of history make for provocative, even perversely gripping reading -- though Lifton and Mitchell should have avoided such missteps as asserting that plutonium was expressly "invented" to make the A-bomb, when in fact Nobel laureate chemist Glenn Seaborg and his Berkeley colleagues "created" it long before the Manhattan Project. A more significant shortcoming, however, is the information they do not provide.

Even if the bombing of Hiroshima was a mistake, Lifton and Mitchell fail to tell us how we might have undone the terrible pain it inflicted. An apology surely would not have been acceptable to an American public still embittered by Pearl Harbor and the ensuing Pacific bloodbath. Nor could an American president reasonably have been expected to disavow nuclear weaponry at a time when the Soviets were strenuously trying to match the United States bomb for bomb.

Americans may feel remorse, grief, pity or sorrow over Hiroshima and Nagasaki's heartrending toll, but surely not collective guilt that requires public expiation. As Lifton especially should know, Hiroshima and the Holocaust, it could be argued, are not moral equivalents.